Nvidia turns to silicon photonics to supercharge next-gen AI clusters

The big picture: As artificial intelligence clusters grow to thousands of accelerators working in unison, the challenge of connecting GPUs with ever-higher bandwidth has become one of the most pressing issues in data center design. Nvidia is responding by moving away from traditional electrical signaling and adopting silicon photonics, a shift the company argues is now essential for scaling large AI systems.

Earlier this year, the company confirmed that its next-generation rack-scale AI platforms will abandon pluggable optical modules in favor of co-packaged optics. At the Hot Chips conference, Nvidia shared new details about its upcoming photonic interconnect products – Quantum-X and Spectrum-X Photonics – scheduled for launch in 2026 for InfiniBand and Ethernet, respectively.

In today's large-scale AI training clusters, servers spanning multiple racks must operate as a single, tightly coupled system. To achieve this, operators have moved switches from the top of individual racks to the end of entire ...